Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

Old age is a long, slow loss of control.

Infancy has no control either. I’ve always found it odd when people say “happy as a baby.” Really? Sometimes it’s fun, like when you get to see your parents do something witty, such as rip a piece of paper in half. But other times, babyhood seems terrifying. You’re so reliant on others. You have to howl and thrash and pray the mashed bananas will appear. The saving grace is, babies don’t know what independence feels like. Old people know what they’re missing.

Chapter 20

The Bladder

The Quest to Figure Out What to Drink

I’VE SPENT A LOT OF time thinking about what to eat but little on what to drink. This month, I’ll change that.

I’ve ordered something called the BluePrintCleanse. This program is the juice fast of the moment, endorsed by a phalanx of women’s magazines and a smattering of B-list celebrities such as Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Julia Stiles.

I ordered it online, and the next day a box arrived with thirty-six bottles, enough for my three-day fast. Actually, enough for both Julie and me. I’ve convinced her to go juice for juice with me.

The bottles come in five colors: light yellow (lemonade with agave nectar and cayenne pepper), white (cashew milk), green for veggie juice (celery, spinach, kale, etc.), red (apple, carrot, and beet, etc.), and dark yellow (pineapple juice, apple juice, and mint).

This juice is, quite possibly, the most expensive in the history of beverages. I’m hoping each one of those lemons in the spicy lemonade was caressed by a shiatsu masseuse while still on the tree because we’re talking two hundred dollars per person.

In the morning, I give Julie her juice, and we tap our plastic bottles together. “Cheers!”

We each take a swig of the green one. Not bad. Sort of a fancy cousin to store-bought vegetable drinks, the pashmina to V8’s cotton.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“It alternates between being refreshing and making me want to gag.”

By 10 a.m., I’m a little hungry, but nothing painful. I go out to run some errands and come back an hour later. I find Julie in our bedroom. She’s . . . chewing?

“What’s in your mouth?”

Julie scurries away, giggling.

I chase after her. “Open your mouth!”

“Ahhhhh.”

It’s clean. Whatever it was, she’d swallowed the evidence. I let her off with a warning.

Time for the spicy lemonade. We tap bottles again, and take a swig. It’s sweet, but with a cayenne pepper kick.

“What do you think?”

“This is so not my thing,” says Julie. “I just really like food.”

I spend the day at the library, reading my health books. I come home at 5 p.m. Julie is sitting in the living room, Lucas on her lap. He is in a postmeltdown stupor. She doesn’t look much happier.

“I have a headache. I got half my work done. I am not happy. Frankly, I’m acting like a bitch.”

I nod as noncommittally as I can.

“I’m having leftover Indian food.”

So that’s it for Julie. She made it nine hours into our three-day fast, not counting the cheating. Julie fasts on Yom Kippur, but that’s her limit. The BluePrint people don’t have thousands of years of guilt-tinged heritage behind them.

I keep on fasting for the next two days. In a dietary version of the Stockholm syndrome, I start to like the juice more and more, especially the almond milk, which is thick and yogurty. I can feel it sloshing around in my otherwise empty stomach.

I keep waiting for an epiphany. Some people say juice fasts clarify their thoughts and give them fresh energy. Unfortunately, for me, it’s having just three effects.

• Hunger. I’m hungry enough that I started to salivate at the sight of lettuce. I repeat: lettuce.

• Crankiness. At one point, I called up BluePrintCleanse customer service because I thought they sent me the “Renovation” cleanse instead of the “Foundation” cleanse I’d ordered. I snapped at them. I turned out to be wrong. Which made me feel terrible for the employees. Can you imagine a grumpier clientele than underfed New Yorkers?

• Spaciness. On the third day, it took me nearly a minute to dial my phone, as I kept losing my train of thought.

When it was over, I craved something solid, something that could break a window if you threw it hard enough. I settled on a potato, which I roasted in our toaster oven, and which was wonderful and nonliquidy—though certainly not optimally healthy (too starchy).

It’s been a week since my juice fast. I do miss that almond milk—that could have been one of the best beverages I’ve ever tasted. But do I feel clear of toxins? Not really.

Maybe I didn’t go into it with an open enough mind. The problem for me, though, is there’s little science supporting juice fasts. There’s a bit of science on the benefits of general, intermittent fasting. According to a 2008 study in the American Journal of Cardiology, fasting is linked to a decrease in heart disease.

But the cleansing claims? As Katherine Zeratsky, a registered dietician with the Mayo Clinic, writes in a cleanse-debunking article, “Most ingested toxins are efficiently and effectively removed by the kidneys and liver and excreted in urine and stool.”

I don’t think I’ll be ordering a second round from BluePrint. Probably a relief to their customer service reps.

The Water Cure

The healthiest liquid, unless you are a newborn in need of colostrum, is, of course, the simplest liquid: water. Sugar-free, vitamin-unenhanced water. We were built to consume it.

How much per day? I’m sure you’ve heard we should be drinking eight eight-ounce glasses a day. It’s a handy mnemonic, but turns out, it’s based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. The Mayo Clinic puts it this way: “If you drink enough fluid so that you rarely feel thirsty and produce between one and two liters or more of colorless or slightly yellow urine a day, your fluid intake is probably adequate.” Which is good. I don’t have to count ounces, one fewer item on my ever-expanding list